Former ESPN anchor Keith Olbermann had a normal one Thursday on his political YouTube show, embarking on a 14-minute vituperative journey which called for the (figurative?) prosecution and conviction of each and every archetype of authoritarian evil in his mind—the Amy Coney Barretts of the world included.
Olbermann said that this segment of the Worst Person in the World was a response to news of an alleged foiled plot by right-wing extremists to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for “treason.” He said this plot was part of a larger scheme enabled and encouraged by President Donald Trump himself. While many—Whitmer included—assigned blame to the president and his rhetoric, Olbermann took things a step further: calling for the prosecution of every single person who has enabled to Trump to do that.
For Olbermann, the Whitmer story “fits into Donald Trump’s desperate attempts to retain the presidency no matter what the election determines.”
The “terrorist Trump,” Olbermann began around the 8:40-mark of the video above, “must be defeated, destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box, and then he, and his enablers, and his supporters, and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees and the William Barrs, and Sean Hannitys, and the Mike Pences, and the Rudy Gullianis and the Kyle Rittenhouses and the Amy Coney Barretts must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has destroyed by turning it over to a virus.”
Barrett’s confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court are scheduled to begin on Monday, Oct. 12.
Olbermann’s Friday episode shared many of the same themes. In it, he took direct aim at Attorney General Bill Barr in response to a report that President Trump’s “Holy Grail”—namely, the John Durham probe of “Obamagate”—would not produce results before the election.
“The most vile attorney general in American history, William Barr, has let Trump know this,” Olbmerann said of the news. “From Trump to Barr, to the average white nationalist and fascist who support them, the words ‘Durham Report’ mean everything. They see it as the key to the entire persecution of Trump, as the key to everything in the QAnon delusion, as the key to their bizarre brew of paranoia and sadism from which they drink daily.”
“In reality it is the last bit of William Barr’s alchemy by which this despicable and corrupt man has turned the utterly necessary and urgent investigation into the coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives into quote ‘Obama has spied on our savior,'” he added.
Olbmerann then listed a number of names of individuals, real and imagined, that Trump has called for the arrests of. He said such calls were straight out of the Soviet Union or banana republics.
[Image via YouTube screengrab]
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